Yates’ all-action, athletic, committed, box-to-box performances were of exactly the type Martin O’Neill loves from a midfielder. And, of course, the emergence of another homegrown player with a long-standing connection to the club warmed the cockles of supporters.

Now. It’s only a start, but an encouraging one and he has proved that he can cut it in the Championship. The challenge, now, is maintaining those standards and holding on to a regular starting berth, for which there is much competition, let’s not forget.

The thing is, though, speak to anyone who has worked with Yates, in the academy or during his loans with Barrow, Notts County and Scunthorpe United, and you will be left in no doubt that the 21-year-old is a young man who will not get carried away, above his station, or let his foot ease off the gas even for just a second.

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Those traits Brazil spoke of are the very building blocks of what makes Nottingham Forest’s academy one of the most productive in the country. There are few breeding grounds that prepare aspiring footballers for the rigours of the game as expertly as happens at the Nigel Doughty Academy. And there there is an argument to be made that Yates exemplifies that more than any player to have emerged in recent years.

Have there been more talented players? Undoubtedly. Are there more talented players on the way? Almost certainly. But Yates is a player who, according to those who know him best, has an attitude that is unparalleled.

I couldn’t help my mind from drifting back this week to a piece I wrote in these pages in August. In it I described how whenever I had asked Jack Lester, the former Forest under-18s and 23s coach, who to look out for over the coming years, it was always Yates he referenced in the most glowing terms. “He would two-foot his Granny if you asked him to,” he once joked. But the dutiful manner with which he marshals the midfield means you can kind of see what he means!

That last word Brazil used, ‘energiser’, might sound as though he is straying in to the realms of jargon. But it means a player whose enthusiasm and exacting standards rubs off on those around him, rather than negativity draining life from a dressing room – and trust me, there are enough of those types at every club in the country.

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I hope this is the start of a long and fruitful career for the Reds. But the other thing I couldn’t help pondering on Tuesday night was how careers can rise and fall on the changing of the man in the dugout.

If the man who was sitting in the Sky Sports studio on Tuesday night, Aitor Karanka, were still at the City Ground, would Ryan Yates have tasted Championship football this season?

I think we know the answer to that because no matter how highly he spoke of Yates – and Joe Worrall, and Ben Brereton – ultimately he didn’t have quite enough faith to put them in the team when it mattered.

Former Nottingham Forest manager Aitor Karanka (Image: Getty Images)

I say that not as a slight towards the Spaniard either. With a place in the Premier League and his job at stake Karanka felt compelled to play one of the multitudes of midfielders he signed in a position where he values experience.

No-one is pretending it is easy to strike a balance between giving youth a chance when ready and striving for success – we need only look at the growing number of Premier League kids heading to the Bundesliga for first-team football and the dilemma it poses for their clubs.

But it is not inconceivable that Yates would have been forced to move on to pastures new in the summer in search of more regular football, much like Brereton chose to back in August. Might Worrall and Tyler Walker have thought the same too?

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Brereton had much to improve upon but he was another player who was imbued with those characteristics Brazil highlighted that define their work. And, while I will not labour on the point, I still can’t help but feel his departure was a crying shame.

After Forest’s evisceration of Arsenal in the FA Cup last season Lester recalled the last day of an exhausting, character-building pre-season trip to an army-style camp in the Lake District back in 2015.

Just when the youth team players thought their ordeal was over, he said, they were asked to pick up a log and carry it to the top of a mountain. Lester’s abiding memory was Yates and Brereton, the star of that win against the Gunners, racing and battling their way to the top.

Who’d have thought that a year on Brereton would have made at best a sideways move in the Championship in search of more games?

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I have said it before and I’ll say it again, the presence of these lads in the squad and the dressing room brings something to a football club that is hard to quantify.

They lift spirits and that ripples throughout the club. And while Forest have had to rely too heavily upon their efforts in recent seasons they have all shown, when called upon, that they are good enough.

There are early signs that O’Neill believes that to be true more than his predecessor.